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As Iran’s retaliation hit American allies throughout the Middle East this week, David Remnick was joined by two New Yorker writers with decades of experience reporting from the region. Robin Wright has reported from Iran extensively, and she met with Ali Khamenei before he became the Supreme Leader of Iran; Dexter Filkins covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and he has been reporting on the Pentagon and military readiness. Filkins and Wright discuss the possibilities for future leadership in Iran; the Trump Administration’s chaotic statements in regard to its goals and time frame; and the economic impact of the war, which is already being felt around the globe.

Further reading:

• “What Ayatollah Ali Khamenei Meant to Iran, and What Comes Next,” by Robin Wright
• “How Marco Rubio Went from ‘Little Marco’ to Trump’s Foreign-Policy Enabler,” by Dexter Filkins
• “The Forever War,” by Dexter Filkins

New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Follow the show wherever you get your podcasts.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

Listen and subscribe: Apple | Spotify | Google | Wherever You Listen

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When the Oscar nominations were announced this year, Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners” set a record. It received sixteen nominations, the most for any film ever. The fact that it’s, in part, a vampire movie, made by a director who’s not yet forty, makes that feat all the more remarkable. Coogler—who previously directed “Creed” and “Black Panther”—sat down with the New Yorker staff writer Jelani Cobb to discuss the recurrent themes of history, faith, and race in his work, and how he refracted them through the lens of horror in “Sinners.”

This segment originally aired on April 11, 2025.

Further reading:

• “Ryan Coogler’s Road to ‘Sinners,’ ” by Jelani Cobb

New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Follow the show wherever you get your podcasts.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

For the cover of the March 16, 2025, issue, the cartoonist Barry Blitt portrays President Donald Trump in his latest guise, as a general heading to war in the Middle East. This all comes after years of promising his voters “America First!” and “no more Forever Wars.” Blitt’s cover image shows the President at his Florida golf resort standing in his martial golf cart alongside his caddy and Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth.

For more war-related covers, see below:

“July 27, 1940,” by Christina Malman

“A Shadow Over the Election,” by Françoise Mouly

“Uphill Battle,” by Barry Blitt

Find Barry Blitt’s covers, cartoons, and more at the Condé Nast Store.

In the animated features of old, people and animals conversed freely, and Walt Disney saw that it was good. Audiences did, too. It was easy enough to believe that Snow White could cajole birds and squirrels into doing housework, or that Cinderella could be fluent in rodent. But that was then; in more recent decades, the sophistications of computer-generated realism have encroached on the terrain of hand-drawn fantasy, and human-critter relations have largely gone the way of Babel. For the big brains at Pixar, always up for a conceptual challenge, interspecies communication is not a given to be embraced but a problem to be solved. And so, in “Ratatouille” (2007), a man and a rat must overcome their language barrier through a shared love of food. In “Brave” (2012), a daughter learns to converse anew with her mother, whom she has accidentally transformed into a bear. One of the wittiest inventions in “Up” (2009) is an electronic dog collar that helpfully translates canine thoughts into human words—in multiple tongues, to boot.

The “Up” collar gets a quick shout-out in the new Pixar movie “Hoppers”—the sort of cute, in-house Easter egg that’s meant to flatter the cleverness of the filmmakers and the discerning brand loyalty of the audience. The story takes place in a small, woodsy American town called Beaverton, but, as we are seldom allowed to forget, it also inhabits a jaunty and irreverent media-consolidation universe, where pop-cultural influences and allusions fly as fast as hummingbirds. Early on, a nineteen-year-old college student named Mabel Tanaka (voiced by Piper Curda) discovers that her biology professor, Dr. Sam (Kathy Najimy), has developed a top-secret technology—a system of helmets, wires, buttons, and monitors that enables an individual human consciousness to “hop” into the body of a highly realistic-looking animal robot. Mabel’s response is pretty much the one that’s already formed in your head: “This is like ‘Avatar’!” To which Dr. Sam retorts, with proprietary defensiveness, “This is nothing like ‘Avatar’!”

I’m generally wary of any movie that attempts to pass off unoriginality as a self-aware joke. (“Avatar,” a trippy, futuristic retread of “Dances with Wolves,” was hardly a fount of storytelling invention to begin with.) But “Hoppers,” directed by Daniel Chong, uses familiarity as a springboard, launching itself into realms of narrative illogic rarely countenanced even by Pixar’s more out-there abstractions, such as “Inside Out” (2015) and “Soul” (2020). In those earlier pictures, metaphysical conceits became visual and dramatic gambits as the filmmakers set out to colonize the vast interior worlds of, respectively, the mind and the spirit. “Hoppers” doesn’t have the same patina of profundity, but, as a result, the story it tells winds up feeling all the stranger. It begins as a work of eco-themed science fiction, veers into civic-minded zoological fantasy, and nearly becomes a body-snatching horror flick—all of it held together by a screw-loose comic vigor that has been absent from the studio’s recent string of mediocrities, including “Lightyear” (2022) and “Elemental” (2023).

The script is by Jesse Andrews, who co-wrote the Pixar comedy “Luca” (2021), a sunny tale of youthful self-discovery and the seemingly unbridgeable chasm between the human and natural worlds. “Hoppers,” though much unrulier in its construction, is onto something similar. Mabel is a freckle-faced, messy-haired misfit, with a love of nature that she inherited from her late grandmother (Karen Huie). She’s an activist at heart, and she wants only to protect her grandmother’s favorite place: a tranquil local glade that, thanks to an industrious beaver colony, has long been a haven of biodiversity. Now, however, the beavers have inexplicably vanished, and they appear to have taken all the birds, fish, insects, and other forest creatures in the vicinity with them. Mabel has her suspicions as to why, especially since Jerry (Jon Hamm), the popular mayor of Beaverton, is trying to build a highway through the area and can do so only if it is cleared of wildlife.

Bent on restoring the beavers to their rightful home, Mabel defies Dr. Sam’s warnings and impulsively commandeers the technology. In beaver form, she makes her way deep into the forest, stumbles on the glade’s various displaced residents, and finds, to her delight, that she can understand their language (and so, of course, can we). Elsewhere, though, the rules that govern this furry fiefdom defy easy comprehension. The animals prove welcoming enough to a bushy-tailed outsider like Mabel, but this isn’t exactly Zootopia. The food chain is in full and pitiless effect, and no one bats an eye, or side-eyes a bat, when natural predatory impulses kick in.

The place has its unnatural elements as well, starting with a system of government that takes the notion of an “animal kingdom” to goofily literal-minded extremes. All of Mabel’s new forest friends—there are deer, rabbits, turtles, raccoons, and a singularly gloomy bear—bow down to a beaver sovereign, King George (Bobby Moynihan), a gregarious and naïve soul who embraces a humble, communal ideal of living. He believes that all creatures great and small, humans included, are acting on a pure-hearted devotion to the common good. “We’re all in this together,” he’s fond of declaring. None of his subjects question this way of thinking, and their zomboid passivity ultimately feels more creepy than charming. Mabel, it appears, has found her way into a village of the dammed.

The plot thickens from there, with an escalating outlandishness that makes “The Wild Robot” (2024), another animated mashup of animals and androids, look like a nature documentary. Mabel wants the beavers to return to the glade and block Mayor Jerry’s highway, and, to that end, she investigates—and exposes—how he engineered the animals’ mass exodus in the first place. An emergency summit is convened, where the genial George is joined by louder, angrier rulers from across the animal kingdom. There is a royal goose with a bulbous beak, voiced by the late Isiah Whitlock, Jr. Meryl Streep lends her imperious dulcet tones to the role of an orange-winged monarch, who, alas, does not call herself Butterfly McQueen. In these moments, “Hoppers” plays like a loopy riff on an Old Testament tale, one in which it’s the animals who get kicked out of Eden. With their eyes newly opened to the full knowledge of human evil, they hatch a uniquely deranged revenge plot, the stupefying and sometimes horrifying particulars of which I’ll leave for you to discover. Suffice it to say that Mabel suddenly realizes she’s gone too far, in both her deception and her activism. She must save the day and make amends.

The dispensing of moral instruction is an often tiresome staple of child-friendly animation, but the lessons that Mabel must learn—to be less impulsive, less strident, and more willing to see the good in others—also turn out to be shrewd organizational and negotiating tactics. The more “Hoppers” goes on, the more it comes to resemble a bonkers political farce, in which such pressing matters as the rights of animals, the fate of the environment, and the destructiveness of human greed can be resolved, or at least productively debated, in a flurry of cross-species coalition-building. The movie’s conclusions are reasonable, centrist ones, perhaps disappointingly so; viewers whose empathy with the four- and six-legged denizens of the glade has been aroused will surely find themselves crying out for mayoral blood. More than once, an insect gets squished for comic effect, and you have to wonder why, in the spirit of all being in this together, the filmmakers didn’t dare to add a human life or two to the body count. Can’t we take it? Haven’t we earned it, with our vainglorious conquests and wanton destruction of the natural world? To root passionately against one’s own species is one of the great, subversive pleasures of moviegoing; certain films in the “Planet of the Apes” series knew this and exploited it for all it was worth. So did “Avatar.”

To which one can only shrug and conclude that Pixar will always be Pixar, a reliable dispenser of movies whose pleasures, even at their most comically unhinged, must come wrapped in a warm, cozy blanket of moral edification and emotional reassurance. And so we get frequent flashbacks to Mabel’s happier times with her grandmother in the glade. We also get a stirring tale of friendship between two beavers, in which the feelings are genuine even if one of the beavers isn’t. In an exquisitely subtle touch, the character animation modulates in accord with our shifting perspectives: note how George seems to transform in shape, expression, and definition, morphing between jovial goofball and dumb animal depending on whose eyes we’re peering through at any given time. “Hoppers” is a hoot but also a more soulful film than some will give it credit for. It knows that, for humans and animals alike, seeing and understanding are one and the same. ♦

Days after Israel and the United States launched a bombing campaign that decimated the upper echelons of Iran’s leadership—killing the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and more than forty top officials, according to the Israeli military—the regime in Tehran has shown little sign of breaking. Instead, Iran has been launching waves of drones and missiles across the Middle East, in an escalation that has plunged the whole region into war. Iran-linked strikes hit U.S. positions in various Gulf countries, and even reached a British air base in Cyprus. NATO was pulled into the action, on Wednesday, when it shot down a ballistic missile that was headed toward Turkey.

The Iranian regime had vowed retribution after Khamenei’s death. “You have crossed our red line and must pay the price,” Iran’s speaker of parliament, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, told the U.S. and Israel, in a televised address. “We will deliver such devastating blows that you yourselves will be driven to beg.” But it’s Iran’s neighbors that have been feeling the brunt of the pain so far. The attacks have elicited a rare response from the militaries of the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia: Qatar said it downed at least two Iranian fighter jets, and Emirati authorities said they have intercepted hundreds of Iranian drones and ballistic missiles. Officials in these countries insist that their inventory of defense munitions can cope with the Iranian onslaught, but there are fears that as the conflict drags on, stockpiles could run low. The missile math may not be in their favor: it costs far less for Iran to launch a cheap drone than it does for the U.S. and its regional partners to shoot it out of the sky. “A war of attrition that exhausts missile defense inventories is the most beneficial outcome for Tehran,” the Soufan Center, a global intelligence consultancy, noted in a recent analysis. “Iran knows this is a war it cannot ‘win’ militarily, but the regime in Tehran may believe they can survive it.”

Disruptions in the Gulf region will be felt all over the world: Dubai is the Middle East’s most important port; a significant proportion of the world’s crude oil, methanol, and fertilizer is exported through the Strait of Hormuz; Qatar’s liquid-natural-gas exports provide a fifth of global supply (and the state’s energy company has suspended all production amid security fears, creating a spike in prices); the region’s airports connect much of South Asia and Africa to the rest of the globe. For the remnants of the Iranian regime—and, especially, the hard-line members of the Revolutionary Guard, who control much of the state’s weaponry—the strategy is clear. They hope to raise the stakes of the war so much that U.S. allies pressure President Donald Trump to change course. “We had no choice but to escalate and start a big fire so everyone would see,” an Iranian regime insider told the Financial Times. “When our red lines were crossed in violation of all international laws, we could no longer adhere to the rules of the game.”

Israel and the U.S. don’t seem that interested in the rules of the game, either. They are launching bombardments across a wide swath of Iran, which have killed at least twelve hundred and thirty people, according to the Iranian Red Crescent Society. That includes dozens of schoolgirls in the coastal city of Minab, who were killed in an apparent bombing of their school, which was near a Revolutionary Guard naval base. Israel has already dropped more than five thousand bombs on Iran since the start of the conflict. The U.S. Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, exulted in the punishing campaign, saying that Operation Epic Fury—as the Administration has named it—had unleashed twice as much air power over Iran than the “shock and awe” phase of the U.S.’s 2003 invasion of Iraq. The Department of Defense recently released a video of an Iranian frigate being torpedoed off the Sri Lankan coast by a U.S. submarine—the first torpedo launched in combat by a U.S. submarine since the Second World War. The sinking, which appears to have killed at least half of the roughly hundred and eighty Iranian sailors onboard, is legally dubious, and raises awkward diplomatic questions for India, which had hosted the Iranian vessel as part of a broader set of maritime exercises to which the U.S. was also invited. For Hegseth, it’s all part of the magic of what he likes to call American “warfighting.” The U.S. and Israel have eviscerated Iran’s Navy and Air Force, and are steadily degrading Iran’s command structure and military assets, including a network of subterranean missile “cities” housing Iran’s arsenal. On Wednesday, analysts at the Long War Journal said there had been a decline in Iranian ballistic-missile launches, likely owing to the efficacy of U.S.-Israeli strikes. “This was never meant to be a fair fight, and it is not a fair fight,” Hegseth said, at a briefing that day. “We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be.”

What sympathy there may have been for a cornered, bruised Iranian regime among its neighbors has faded in the face of Tehran’s escalation. A Gulf official, who spoke to me anonymously, said Iran’s strategy was “counterproductive,” given recent attempts at rapprochement made by some Arab monarchies, and their support for Tehran’s diplomatic track with Washington. Now, whenever this conflict ends, those monarchies will instead focus on protecting themselves against future Iranian threats, and will deepen military partnerships with outside powers—take, for example, recent defense pacts signed between Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, and between the U.A.E. and India. “What’s happened to the Gulf will have long-term ramifications in terms of security realignment and relationships with Iran,” the official said.

“Iran has killed any chance of reconciliation with the Gulf,” Marwan Muasher, a former foreign minister and deputy Prime Minister of Jordan, told me. Before the war, some Arab interlocutors had been quietly lobbying the White House against such action, in part out of fear that a direct war against Iran would yield an even more unstable and chaotic status quo in Tehran. Better the devil you know than the one you don’t, the thinking went. “But now they know the devil and they know this devil has no red lines,” Ali Shihabi, a prominent Saudi commentator, told me, suggesting that the Iranian regime “had placed a Sword of Damocles over the Gulf.” The barrage of drones and missiles from Iran, Shihabi added, has “emboldened the voices of those within the Gulf who say that this regime should be degraded as much as possible.”

That degradation proceeds apace amid the U.S.-Israeli campaign, though much remains unclear about the final goal, and about the most plausible way out of the conflict. Though some Trump officials claim that they’re not engaged in a regime-change war, Trump told reporters on Thursday that he had “to be involved” in the appointment of Khamenei’s successor, which sounds an awful lot like regime change. Israel, meanwhile, appears content to keep battering the Islamic Republic, whatever the downstream consequences, while also mustering a new offensive into southern Lebanon against Hezbollah. Enabled by the U.S., Israel now bestrides the Middle East as a paramount hegemon: its military tool kit and reach is unmatched, its status as the region’s sole nuclear power is unchallenged, and its ability to strike with impunity at perceived threats far from its borders is unchecked. By midweek, Israeli officials were briefing reporters about plans to potentially balkanize Iran by boosting support to anti-regime Iranian Kurdish factions operating across the country’s western border with Iraq.

Ethnic insurgencies may present the most realistic internal threat to the Iranian regime, which has quashed civil society and pro-democracy protest movements for years. But they present no platform for actually bringing down the Islamic Republic. A popular uprising, which Trump insisted should follow the U.S.’s bombardments, is nowhere in sight. Experts also believe that the death and destruction wrought by the U.S.-Israeli campaign may galvanize domestic support for the regime, even from an Iranian populace that is fed up with its oppressive theocracy and stagnant revolutionary project. “Those who loathe the clerical establishment may still recoil at the spectacle of foreign jets in Iranian skies and the explicit declaration that their state is to be dismantled,” Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, a scholar of the international politics of the Middle East, wrote in the London Review of Books. “External assault does not erase internal grievance, but it can reorder it. Anger at the regime may be temporarily subordinated to anger at the attacker.” The anonymous Gulf official said this was something that many of the Gulf states had warned the Trump Administration about: “If your goal is regime change, bombing will unite them.”

Danny Citrinowicz, a former Israeli defense-intelligence officer with expertise on Iran, wrote on social media on Thursday that, despite the immense regional pressure on Iran, its surviving leadership “assesses that its capacity for absorption and persistence is higher than that of its adversaries,” and that “time ultimately works in its favor.” Muasher, the former Jordanian foreign minister, argued that the strategic difficulty of defeating and replacing the Iranian regime may prove too confounding for a trigger-happy White House that seems more invested in the spectacle of victory than in the complex project of building peace. Within the U.S., there’s minimal appetite, even among Republicans, for deploying boots on the ground, or for an open-ended intervention that could continue through multiple election cycles. “Trump is not going to implement a one-year, two-year strategy,” Muasher said. “I think that Iran’s calculation is that Trump is not patient, that Trump is going to move on.” ♦